The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) utilizes several sampling gears for fisheries-independent monitoring of finfish and shellfish communities. They include bag seines, trawls, gill nets and oyster dredges. TPWD uses multiple gears in a random sampling protocol, and they identify (to the lowest taxonomic unit possible) and count everything that they collect. more

This dataset contains bag seine data collected for the Lower Laguna Madre system in Texas from 1977 to 2008. Collected data also included spatial and temporal information describing the sample location and time, collection gear information, hydrological data (e.g. dissolved oxygen, water temperature, and salinity), weather conditions, species caught, and number of each species captured. Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) calculated the relative abundance data, calculated as the catch of a particular species in a sample divided by the total number of animals captured in that sample. Absence data was recorded for species on the TPWD species sampling lists that were not captured during sampling.